Review: 'The Nativity Story'

Keisha Castle Hughes and Shohreh Aghdashloo

Keisha Castle Hughes and Shohreh Aghdashloo

Michael Wilmington, The Chicago TribuneZap2It.com

Few stories are more familiar than the one told in "The Nativity Story,"a new film about the trials of Mary and Joseph, the journey fromNazareth to Bethlehem and the birth of Christ. So it seems a wonder attimes that director Catherine Hardwicke and writer Mike Rich stillmanage to make the tale seem fresh and vital.

Their movie is reverent without seeming too pious-minded, and lovingwithout being sticky. And it has actors in the central roles, KeishaCastle-Hughes and Oscar Isaac, who are young, beautiful, even a bitlusty-looking, and who don't fit the usual cliched image of Mary, theimmaculate virgin, and Joseph, her aging protector.

Hardwicke became famous for "Thirteen," a realistic contemporary dramaabout youthful delinquency and sexuality -- and, as you'd expect, shedoesn't deliver a typical religious movie. Covering the events from thetime of Zechariah's vision in the temple up to Herod's massacre of theinnocents, and the flight of Mary and Joseph into Egypt, Hardwicke andRich retell the story with art and simplicity, without the charactersbecoming creche figurines.

Herod's massacre is their framing device. We see the mad monarchordering the slaughter at the beginning, and then we move back to theevents that led up to it: the birth of John the Baptist, the lunacies ofHerod and his tax plan, the long journey of Joseph and Mary intoBethlehem, and the Nativity as witnessed by the shepherds and the ThreeWise Men -- Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar.

Throughout, Hardwicke keeps us aware of the danger and primitivism ofthe places around Mary and Joseph -- and Jesus.

This movie isn't an intense visceral shocker like Mel Gibson's "The
Passion of the Christ." Nor is it a groundbreaking neo-realistdepiction, like Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 "The Gospel According to St.Matthew" -- although Hardwicke stages much of her film near the ancientbut well-preserved Italian village of Matera, where both Gibson andPasolini shot the main parts of their movies.

The moviemakers haven't embossed "Nativity Story" with greeting-cardimagery. They haven't sentimentalized, overdramatized, or stuffed itwith contemporary political parallels. Instead, they've told the storywith a measured seriousness but also with an often fiery, youthfulquality.

New Zealander Castle-Hughes, the young Oscar-nominated star of "WhaleRider," brings this film some of the liveliness and joy that infusedthat role. Isaac is a 2005 graduate of the Juilliard Academy, and hebrings the part a freshness and vulnerability it usually doesn't have.

Herod is the Irish actor Ciaran Hinds, who played Julius Caesar in HBO's"Rome." Others in the cast include Hiam Abbass ("Paradise Now") as Anna,Mary's mother; and Shohreh Aghdashloo, the Oscar-nominated Iranianactress who played the wife in "House of Sand and Fog," is Elizabeth,Zechariah's wife and John's mother. A hunky-looking actor, Alexander
Siddig, is the Angel Gabriel, and the interchanges among the Wise Men,especially the ones involving skeptical Gaspar (Stefan Kalipha), areoften played for a bit of gentle humor.

Scriptwriter Rich, who initiated the project, has gone to great lengthsto keep the characters plausibly motivated and the movie tasteful. AndHardwicke, who began her film career as a production designer, has doneher best to make it look and sound beautiful. The modernistic score isby Mychael Danna, who works most often with Canada's often audaciousexperimentalist Atom Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter").

"The Nativity Story" surprised me. I didn't expect such an obviousart-film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is greatEnglish literature, and it's just as capable of a more elevated style --as we see in John Huston's epic "The Bible" -- as it is of the popularstorytelling we see in the shamelessly operatic Cecil DeMille movies, orthe gorier excesses of Gibson's "Passion."

"Nativity Story" lacks a certain excitement and narrative depth, but itis capable of pleasing, on some level, believers and skeptics alike.

I wasn't much moved by "Nativity" -- perhaps it was too careful andintelligent -- but, as I watched it, I could sense some of the urgencyof its belief, the universality of its themes of God, loneliness andredemption. "Nativity" is a movie that may not take full advantage ofits tale but doesn't betray it either.